How to Solo: Phrasing

Here’s something that’s often talked about, but never really explained: melodic phrasing.

What is Phrasing?

Well, in music theory, a “phrase” is basically a group of notes in a melody. Just like a phrase that you might use in a sentence when you speak, a musical phrase is only a small portion of the whole melody that could almost stand on it’s own (without the rest of the sentence melody). They normally only last about two bars (or measures) each.

So, if that’s a phrase, what is phrasing?

Phrasing is simply the act of constructing a phrase. Phrases are groups of notes that make melodic sense on their own…therefore this post is about how to group together notes in a melody that make sense on their own (we got there in the end!).

Why is Phrasing Important?

Phrasing is important because if your melodies- or solos- don’t have phrases they’ll end up just being note after note after note with no real direction or meaning. So, in order for your soloing to be more melodic and meaningful, you want to group your notes together in phrases, and those phrases will make up melodies. Just like if you want anything you say to make sense you’ll want to group your words into phrases and your phrases into sentences.

How do you “phrase” notes?

This is s good exercise that’ll get you away from improvising a stream of endless, rambling notes, and more towards melodic playing in phrases.

Say you had a chord progression: C – Am – Dm – G (maybe not the most interesting progression in the world, but it’ll do!). Now, you could just widdle away over that with the C major pentatonic (same notes as the A minor pentatonic), but that wouldn’t really be melodic enough for this.

What’s better is if you pick out target notes for each chord, and then limit yourself to playing groups of only 4 notes at a time (for example). This means that three notes will be improvised and the fourth will be your target note (which you’ll hold for longer than the others- just like a comma, or pause, in speech). So, in this example, you will create 4 note phrases.

How to select “Target Notes”

A very quick and easy way to select target notes is to take the open chord and move the shape up 12 whole frets (one octave). Remember the open strings are now at the 12th fret, the first fret is now the 13th etc. Now, for each chord you can pick a note from the shape (you’re essentially picking out a note from that chord, just an octave higher).

For the above progression, you might pick a C on the 13th fret, B string over the C chord, the same note over the A minor chord (as it’s in both shapes), the D on the 15th fret, B string over the D chord (from the third fret in the open D minor shape, moved up 12 frets) and the same D note over the G chord. This might not be the most interesting selection of notes, and I definitely encourage you to experiment with target notes over chords to find ones you like better.

So you’re solo would go something like this: 3 improvised notes then hold the 13th fret, B string. Then 3 more improvised notes followed by holding the same 13th fret, B string. Then another 3 improvised notes followed by holding the 15th fret, B string (over the D chord). I’m sure you get the idea…

…and if you’ve done all that, you would have just been phrasing.

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Rob.

October 27, 2010 at 11:00 pm | Guitar Technique and Exercises, How to | No comments